Friday Afternoon with the Cats

Within a year or two of moving to New York City from bucolic Portland, Oregon, I found a book called Marcovaldo, or Seasons in the City by Italo Calvino, an Italian writer. Its a short collection of beautiful stories about Marcovaldo, a simple laborer in an unnamed Italian city. Marcovaldo is a simple creature, who goes about his business as best he can, but he's also a bit of a dreamer and so he gets into some adventures.

I loved this book when I first moved to the city, because Marcovaldo was very soulful and had a craving for a natural sort of life, and he sought it out in the nooks and crannies of the harsh city. For instance, in one of the stories (I believe - it's been a long time!) he finds a mushroom growing in the city and he gets very excited and tries to protect it as it grows. My favorite story, the one that has stuck with me over these many years and the subject of this long introduction, is called "The Garden of the Stubborn Cats". In this story, Marcovaldo befriends a cat near his work, and he starts following the cat around, seeing the city from the cat's point of view. This eventually leads Marcovaldo to the titular garden, the last free space in the city for cats to gather. There's not much too it, narrative-wise, but it's a lovely story. It's actually available online (maybe some grad student's translation?) here. And if you like it, I highly recommend the book, which I just saw is available new on Amazon for a whopping $2.60!

Which brings me to the real topic of this post -- my trip today to the Jardin Botanico in Buenos Aires. This park, perhaps the nicest in the city, is about a half-mile from my apartment, and it is the home to many abandoned cats. I had some time to kill today, so I did what I've done many times, and went over and hung out with the cats. I love to do this. I find it incredibly charming when there are cats lounging around a public place. Mind you, I like dogs just fine, but I wouldn't want a hundred stray dogs in a big park. A hundred stray cats, though -- it's kind of sweet.

I found two nice cats who wanted to be my friend today. There were actually many cats out today, but I got enough action out of these two, so I didn't go looking further. Here is the first cat:


As you maybe can see, this cat was very clean and healthy-looking. Perhaps it had not been in the park too long. Most of the cats are no doubt abandoned by owners, and some of them can get pretty scruffy. This cat was very pretty and seemingly healthy. Unfortunately, this cat seemed to be more interesting in doing the self-petting routine in my presence than in actually having me pet him. It's a strange habit of cats, something to do with spreading their scent, I guess. Anyway, this cat took off, so I focused my attentions on the other.

The second cat was also handsome in his own way. He had beautiful black fur, and seemed relatively clean. He was very, very skinny, though -- definitely not well-fed. And there was one other thing that you might notice if mr. black cat came up to you for a little pet -- he was totally missing one eye:
This was not a damaged eye, this was a missing eye. Like, a sunken, kind-of-puss-encrusted eye socket with no eye in it. So of course my heart goes out to the disadvantaged kitty, and I tried to be as nice to him as I could. These park cats tend to be a little wary though, so you often don't get to spend too much time with one before it slinks away. This one actually went away and came back a few times, which is how I managed to get the picture. Poor kitty -- I'm going to have to start bringing some food down there and feeding them. I hope I can find this one again.

I'm clearly not the only one who likes going to the park and hanging out with the cats. It's kind of heart-warming, actually, there seems to be quite a number of people who come to the park regularly to be with the cats, and sometimes to feed them.

And speaking of feeding the kitties, I saw a lady today who the cats really seemed to know. As I said, they're usually a little wary, even when there's food around, but not with this lady:
This was great, and I wasn't the only one who thought this was hilarious. A nice moment in our own little Garden of Abandoned Cats.

Inundacion!

The word for 'flood' in spanish is "inundacion", which I love. It sounds so much more dramatic than "flood".

So today we had inundaciones around the city. It was raining buckets this morning, for several hours. Way, way more rain than we get in New York except maybe once a decade. This is a pretty regular occurrence here, the semi-tropical downpour that floods the streets.

There was a big lake in the street outside my window, though only two or three inches deep. But a few blocks away, it looked like this:

I saw an image like this on the TV news at around noon, and got all excited. Oooh, baby, here I am, so close to trouble! (Right -- in my comfy apt on the 3rd floor, with the cable TV on, etc.) Then shortly after the electricity went out. Trouble indeed! But no, the rain stopped shortly thereafter, and I just laid in bed and read a book for an hour or so. I did have to take a cold shower before heading out, though -- oh, how I suffer!

I had spanish class downtown, and I wasn't sure if the subte (subway) was running, but amazingly it was. Delays, of course, delays in jam-packed cars full of hot damp people. (No AC in the trains here, not for 30 cents a ride.) But amazingly, it was running, right under the street where this picture was taken a couple hours earlier.

I swear, it amazes me that places like Buenos Aires and Mexico City, and for that matter New York, manage to run as smoothly as they do, with all the things that can go wrong. God bless those hard-working civil servants and whoever else keeps the cities running.

This evening the local TV news (which I watch for spanish practice!) was full of hand-wringing about the flooding in Buenos Aires and how the government has not planned well enough and has not done the public works that it should etc. etc. etc. But honestly, I was shocked that the city cleaned up as fast as it did. The first thing I said to my spanish teacher was, hey, you guys have some good alcantarillas (sewers) here. She wasn't buying it.

Neihgborhoiod Rallies in Support of Cartoneros

As I noted in an earlier post, I think the presence of the Cartoneros here in Buenos Aires is pretty much the most interesting thing about being in Buenos Aires right now. Throughout the whole city there is a small army of freelance recyclers combing through all the garbage looking for anything of value. Anything they find they carefully pack up and pull around in these very primitive two-wheeled carts:

They are called Cartoneros because most of what they gather is cardboard, or carton. Though they'll take anything of value. You see things like toilet bowls, old beat-up mattresses, and discarded computers in their carts -- anything, really.

They used to have a train that ran specifically for the Cartoneros, called the Tren Blanco, or white train. This ran from downtown out to the outskirts, where most of the cartoneros live. (They couldn't possibly afford to pay rent in the city. They make about a hundred bucks a month. And they work hard, all day, for a hundred bucks a month.) They canceled the Tren Blanco about a month ago, though I don't know why.

So now lots of the Cartoneros are screwed. The only option they have for moving their findings
is on a truck. And lord knows there are trucks working with the Cartoneros -- I see them loading up late at night when I'm out on my bicycle.

But unfortunately there appears to be more Cartoneros than trucks. So there are Cartoneros who are essentially trapped in the city, living on the streets, in lots, in parks, waiting for the weekend, or whenever they can get a truck to pick them and their findings up.

There was a big group of Cartoneros living in the fancy neighborhood of Belgrano the last few weeks. This isn't so far from where I live -- maybe two miles. It's pretty upper-middle-class, maybe like the upper west side of manhattan. (Recoleta would be the upper east side, I guess.)

Last week I was watching the local news, and they showed a "desalojo de Cartoneros" -- the police forcibly evicting the Cartoneros. There were a number of people passively resisting, and the police picked them up by the arms and legs and dragged them through the streets into police vans. And there were tons of people screaming and shouting and just general mayem all about. It looked pretty ugly on TV, and I guess it was.

This kind of bugged me, of course. These poor Cartoneros, lord knows they work hard, for probably the lowest possible pay. These people -- men, women, and lots, lots of children -- don't dawdle, they hustle around all day, very industriously. And then they have to manually pull these carts through the street, sometimes loaded crazy high with stuff. So all I could think was, oh, the fancy Portenos (residents of Buenos Aires) couldn't stand to have the unfortunate unwashed around, so they got the police to do their bidding. The bitter taste of vastly uneven distribution of wealth.

But my faith in the Portenos was renewed a few days later when I saw on the news again that there was a demonstration of residents of Belgrano protesting the police action to remove the Cartoneros. There were lots of man-on-the-street interviews with people at the demonstration, and almost all of them said some variation of the same thing -- these poor people, they are just trying to make a living, there's no other work out there, you have to respect them for trying to feed their families, etc., etc. It was nice, a nice reminder that despite its current economic situation, Buenos Aires still has a strong liberal, communitarian ethos.

Lots of good people here, even in the fancy neighborhoods.

Futbol fan police escort

I just saw the strangest thing about an hour ago. I coming out of the big park in palermo, and I hear police sirens coming from a long way away. As I was coming to the edge of the park, the sirens were just starting to pass by. There were a few motorcycle cops up front clearing the way, and then the main group, spread out over about a quarter mile came up. And this group seemed to be nothing but futbol fans on their way to today's game for River Plate, one of the two big local futbol teams.

There were four or five old dilapidated buses, with guys hanging out the windows and leaning out the doorwells, all yelling and hooting and what-not. My first thought was, oh, that might be fun, but then I saw that the buses were absolutely jammed inside, like worse than the worse rush-hour subway. I'm kind of guessing that the old buses didn't have any seats either, it looked like everyone was standing up, cattle-car style.

There were also about 15 or 20 cars filled with these guys, too, and some motorcycles. And these were for the most part grown men, I think, guys in their 20's it looks like, though surely there were plenty of teens and guys in their 30's and maybe even 40's.

And there were flags and banners and stuff, of course, draped across the sides of the buses, and held out the windows of the buses and cars. Because, lord knows, these guys want to make sure that we know who they support.

What's interesting here, of course, is that a bunch of knuckle-heads on their way to their team's game have to have a police escort. And it was a substantial police escort -- There must have been 10 motorcycle cops, and about 4 or 5 police cars, and they were stopping cross-traffic and everything. Clearing the way so these fans don't come to a stop. Lord knows what would happen then, I suppose.

I haven't researched this phenomenon or paid it much attention, but it seems to be a big part of life here, and elsewhere. Young men who support some sports team (pretty much always soccer, it appears) in such fervent fashion that they become dangerous. Here they refer to the rowdy fans as "the barra brava", which means the fierce, brave, or angry fans. Fierce seems to be the appropriate word here. There was a big scandal here a year or so ago, an internecine battle where the River barra brava fought amongst themselves to the point of plotting great violence against each others, maybe even murder. (I'm not that sure of the details, and don't really want to put in the effort to find out -- this stuff makes me sick.) Really, I just don't get it.

One thing that's interesting and not at all surprising, is that this is entirely a male phenomenon. I remember reading this about the UK, how twenty, thirty years ago when they were having real soccer thug problems, the fans were all male. Then after much cracking down and much cleaning up of stadiums and much general prosperity, soccer game attendance has become a family matter, and the thugs just aren't a problem anymore.

I thought of this when I came home and saw on the local news some beauty contest, swear to god, miss argentine wheat, or the wheat queen or something else suitable to the national wheat festival. It was the usual, fantastically beautiful twenty year-olds parading around in bathing suits. And I thought, girls, don't let your guys turn into soccer thugs. But they do, and I think this is a big problem in this society, and in a lot of societies.

What problem, you ask? It's this -- too much segregation of the sexes. The girls here seem to do girly things together, and the boys do boy things together. It's very group-y, this culture, it seems, much like spain. Everyone goes out in groups. But here the groups seem very sex-segregated. Mind you, there are plenty of counter-examples, but in general it seems that the girls here are happy being girly amongst themselves, and the boys are left to be boyish among themselves. And what does this produce?

Boys acting like sociopaths, that's what. Futbol fans that require a police escort.